Islam and Politics - The Stimson Center

x | Introduction
In all our conversations, conferences, meetings, roundtables, and focus groups, we have
sought to elicit the most candid possible discussion, and we have done so by explicitly
placing all conversations off the record and not for attribution. At times, our interlocutors
have informed us that they would not conceive of saying publicly what they are willing to
say under such safeguards in a small group of their peers.
It will be readily apparent that the geographical range of our work, while it encompasses the
preponderant part of the world’s Muslims, also includes nations of substantial size where
Muslims are in the minority and where the tacit or explicit foundational norms behind public
discourse are Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, or explicitly secular. Thus, an essential part of
our work is also to ask the following: How more generally are religious identity, religious
conviction and values, and ideologies of social and political governance related to one
another in today’s world? What distinctions and commonalities are found in the ways that
different religious or ideological traditions have addressed common challenges of social,
economic, and political life?
That said, Muslims constitute the majority in one of our regions of interest (the Middle
East), and, in the others, majorities of major nations (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Pakistan, Sudan) or substantial and important minorities in non-Muslim nations (India,
Kenya, Sri Lanka, Tanzania). Because US policy shows a high degree of interest in the
Muslim world, our inquiry into the role of ideology has also substantially focused on the
intellectual life of this world.
Among the themes that have emerged in the course of our work are the following:
• Identity and ideology are highly variegated across the Muslim world. The Muslim world
and the world of Islamic thought are not monolithic, any more than is Christendom.
• Issues of identity, authority, and who speaks for Islam are hotly contested within particular
Muslim societies and among Muslim societies.
• Inordinate interest in the cultural and theological dimensions of contemporary developments
in the Muslim world has obscured the political character of most mobilization
under way there: political mobilization more similar than dissimilar to that in
non-Muslim societies.
• The wide range of opinion on key political and cultural questions in the Muslim
world is not much appreciated in the West. This is particularly so in the case of views
of violence in Islamic thought and in the Muslim world.
• The perspectives of Muslims living as minorities in non-Muslim majority countries
(India, the Philippines Sri Lanka, and Thailand) are quite distinct from those of Muslims
living in predominantly Muslim countries. Minority communities are slow to